Russian Blog
This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
Learning Russian Accents
By Dmitry Matchin 26 November 08
Telling you more about things you may be interested to know but may not learn in a Russian course.
This article is about Russian accents. Given Russia’s immense size, this must be a fascinating subject. There is something striking for you to learn about Russia, but, if you are studying Russian, it may well come as a nice surprise to you. I will try to explain here why Russian is different from most major European languages when it comes to language variation.
When we think of languages, we tend to perceive them as uniform entities that are represented in speakers’ minds intact. But any language exists in many forms. Languages are in constant flux. Most people think of variation in terms of the existing accents of a particular language. More broadly, variation is about dialects, but it is true that differences in pronunciation are the most conspicuous and that speakers draw on them more easily when it comes to distinguishing between different language varieties.
Usually, accents are geographically distributed. Cockney, for example, is the accent (dialect) of East London, and Scouse is that of Liverpool. In fact, it is common knowledge that in Britain accents change every 50 miles or even less. What is interesting about such diversity is that different language varieties in England (and in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) are easily recognisable. If you happen to come from Yorkshire, it is most likely that your accent will give you and your origin away (unless you go out of your way to conceal it). There are also social dialects and accents. Of course, they emerge on the basis of a particular geographical variety (usually the one employed by a group with more power and status), but with time this dialect becomes, due to a process known in linguistics as standardization, a standard (or literary) variety. It is available, in principle, to everyone regardless of their geographical background. Thus, in France the standard variety is based on the Parisian dialect, in Russia on the Moscow dialect.
You might be aware of the high status of what came to be known in England as Received Pronunciation (RP). RP is also known as BBC or Queen’s English (although the Queen’s English is a unique variety that nobody else speaks and BBC English is no longer as prescriptive as it used to be). It is RP that is taught to foreigners as the standard variety of British English. What you probably do not know is that, according to estimates by sociolinguists, only about 4% of the total population of the United Kingdom speak RP. Even when speakers modify their speech according to the norms of RP, they usually retain at least some local features in their pronunciations (this is evident with the present-day BBC: there are an increasingly large number of presenters with modified local accents). Most people in Britain are proud of where they come from, their way of speaking being the most important facet of identity.
Russia, however, presents quite a different picture. To be sure, there are local accents and dialects but their standing on the map of Russia is very different from the situation in Britain or other European countries. For one thing, standard Russian is not only the most prestigious, but also the most ubiquitous variety in Russia. A person from, say, Novosibirsk (in south-west Siberia) may sound exactly like someone from Moscow. Generally, people will employ one way of speaking (in Britain or in Germany, for example, speakers can have more than one accent in their repertoires). Secondly, in Russia it is being educated vs. being uneducated and coming from an urban centre vs. coming from the countryside that are more important indicators of identity.
One reason for the lower variation in Russian accents is purely linguistic. Generally, most accent variation is due to vowel sounds. In standard British English, there are 20 vowel sounds, called ‘phonemes’ in phonetics. In Russian, there are only five. This means that in Russian there is less scope for producing different variants of each vowel phoneme.
The most important reasons, though, are social. Factors like large-scale migration and the mixing of dialects, intensive linguistic standardization, education, social mobility, and the spread of radio and television have all contributed to the high homogeneity of the Russian language. The Moscow dialect itself was formed as a mixture of northern and southern Russian dialects. Since the late eighteenth century, Russian has emerged as one of the most standardized European languages (classical Russian literature had something to do with it, too). The standard variety of Russian has basically always been the only language of secondary and higher education. Social mobility with its aspirations to Moscow as the centre of human activity in the country is still very strong in Russia (remember the three sisters in the eponymous Chekhov play who desperately wanted to go to Moscow). And finally, if you watch Russian television and listen to Russian radio, you will hear no other dialect but standard Russian (which is still a dialect!).
As has already been mentioned, all this has something to do with being educated and the city vs. village opposition. In Russia, these associations are extremely strong. So if you have a non-standard accent, the implication is that you come from a village or that you are not educated – or both. Most non-Russians are unaware that Russians always viewed the first Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, as somewhat uneducated. Both of them were born and grew up in the countryside and had some non-standard features in their accents. And these features have always been perceived as not geographical or local but as “uneducated”. In contrast, both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, coming from St. Petersburg, speak the standard variety of Russian and are regarded by most as well educated. Most people from urban centres speak like Putin and Medvedev (even though not all of them are necessarily highly educated!).
So what are these features that most people in Russia (those with the standard accent, of course) consider uneducated? There are historically three major groups of dialects in Russia: northern (to the north of Moscow), southern (to the south of Moscow), and those in between (with Moscow at the centre). One of the striking phonetic features of standard Russian is so-called akanye or a-saying (this is due to such a common phenomenon in Russian as vowel reduction which also exists, in a different form, in English). Akanye basically means that the vowel /o/ is pronounced as [a] in unstressed position. So moloko (“milk”) is pronounced as [malako] (the last /o/ is stressed). Such pronunciation is typical of Moscow and southern Russian dialects whereas in the north of Russia people (mostly in the countryside) say [o] both in stressed and unstressed positions (hence no vowel reduction): [moloko]. This is known as okanye (o-saying). The only difference between Moscow and southern Russian accents is that in the south the usual hard [g] (like in the English word “get”) is pronounced as the so-called fricative [g] (like the voiced “ch” in the Scottish word “loch”). This may seem a very minor difference, but Russians are very sensitive to it and, to standard speakers, it sounds quite rough (Gorbachev, for example, has the fricative [g]).
There are some other recognisable accents in Russian which are commented on. But these are employed by non-native speakers of Russian (for whom Russian is a second language), usually from far regions of Siberia (such as the Chukchi Peninsula) and from the Caucasus and central Asian republics (Russians who live in these places usually command the standard variety of Russian). Very often these accents become a source of numerous jokes (like, for instance, the Russian accent of English in the English-speaking world).
So where does all this leave you as a learner of Russian? When people who learn English as a second language come to the UK, they are baffled by the sheer number of English accents (remember that only 4% of Britons speak RP). Very often, this leads to considerable difficulty in understanding locals. With Russian, there is no such danger (unless you plan to go to a village and talk to old people). Wherever you want to go, be it St. Petersburg in the west or Vladivostok in the east (just imagine Russia’s vast expanse), if you have any comprehension problems they will not be because of differences in accents!